


A Gift

by the_blue_fairie



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, snow sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 11:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25849153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_blue_fairie/pseuds/the_blue_fairie
Summary: Iduna, Elsa, and Anna have all known pain. Their scars run deep, too deep to be seen upon the skin. But they will not submit. They will not be cast down. An exploration of the traumas faced by the women of the royal family of Arendelle - told from Iduna's perspective.
Relationships: Agnarr/Iduna (Disney), Anna & Elsa (Disney)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	A Gift

_They say she's calm, they say she's kind_  
_They say she never speaks her mind_

She saw him seldom, the red-haired war-king.

She was only a child. The gold of the Forest occupied her thoughts more constantly than the figure of a foreign king, come to converse with the elders – but his countenance still left its impression…

Like hewn stone, but flesh.

Affable.

She remembered her father going with the company to greet him, cautious but earnest – the happiness of hope on his lips.

Still, she remembered the whisperings too – the whisperings among her people she was too young to understand but understood.

A gift, he had promised them. A gift of peace.

A mighty dam.

( _Accept the gift._ )

A cajoling figure flashing before her memory – a childhood glimpse only made more pronounced by the portrait hanging in the castle gallery now – a… dignified… face.

Affable. Cajoling. Dignified.

Words. Arendellian words.

Arendellian words that bled onto her tongue… but did not leave a bitter taste because… because…

Because they became her words.

Her words. The queen of Arendelle’s words. Arendelle’s words.

_Cajoling._

There was a hardness to such a word, like the blow of a quarterstaff wielded by her kin… and yet not like that because a quarterstaff struck with force while _cajoling_ coaxed a thought like a strike but coaxed it smilingly… so that perhaps it coaxed another thought as smiling as itself…

_Cajoling_ had an edge like an Arendellian sword to cut the throat.

In using the word _cajoling_ , Iduna ran a blade across Runeard’s throat – ran it delicately, wet the blade only lightly with drops of blood.

Yet, in using the word, she… didn’t… do that.

To subtly doubt while lionizing was still to lionize.

She was Arendellian now.

(Was she?)

(Who was she?)

She was Iduna, queen of… this land…

She loved Agnarr.

Agnarr loved his father.

Loved his memory, honored the memory of him…

She had passed Runeard’s portrait in the gallery a hundred times…

She honored his memory too.

There was dignity in his painted brow.

A king’s brow.

Like Agnarr’s, like his son’s… and yet… not like…

(Whisperings.)

Runeard would have used the word _cajoling_ to describe himself.

_Affable_ too. _Dignified_ , certainly.

And even if _cajoling_ was not _amicable_ , even if _affable_ was not _kind_ , the words had the hints of amicability and kindness.

More than hints, in fact. _Affable_ was a better word than kind. _Affable_ was _good-natured._ _By nature, good. Good in nature. Good in heart._

An Arendellian sword would not wound the phantom-memory of an Arendellian king.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Sword-words did not make a long-dead king bleed – and if they did, even the lividest of scars is _dignified._

( _Is that resentment?_ )

(No!)

Runeard was a good man.

A noble father to a nobler son.

(Then why the whisperings in her heart?)

(Her heart was in the wrong.)

( _Accept the gift._ )

(A gift of peace to strengthen our waters…)

Iduna distrusted any gift in which there was no choice.

Any gift given with the illusion of choice.

( _Accept the gift_ , says the warlord-king, _or else you are ungrateful._ )

( _Accept the gift given in benevolence. Only the ungrateful refuse such a gift. You have the choice to accept the gift, but if you do not choose to accept the gift, you are branded. Marked._ )

(Scars are dignified upon the face of a king…)

(What about the face of a queen?)

(She would wear her scars proudly to stand in defiance…)

(No, she wouldn’t. She was of Arendelle. Coward. Coward with some vestiges of strength.)

(But… Elsa…)

(What about scars on the face of a queen that was to be?)

Elsa was too young for such scars…

And yet she had them – not the scars upon the mottled face of a war-king or the silver scars of the Northuldra in battle… scars that ran deeper… too deep to be seen upon the flesh… scars like her mother’s…

Splintering from the inside, bleeding from the inside with no scars on the skin.

At the age of eight.

Iduna’s world shattered in youth – but she had more time in brightness than this…

She knew what it was to feel broken – as Elsa did, as Anna did.

Anna’s smiles concealed the shards, Elsa’s solemnity…

_Solemnity_ was an ugly word, _smiles_ uglier.

( _Mama, I’m scared Anna thinks I don’t love her anymore._ )

( _Mama, why doesn’t Elsa love me anymore?_ )

( _Mama, tell Anna I love her._ )

( _I will, sweetheart._ )

Iduna loved her daughters so very much…

The question had stirred in her, holding baby Elsa in her arms, the question of choice.

What choice does a baby have in any of this?

(A gift to Iduna. A gift of the spirits.)

( _Accept the gift the spirits give in benevolence. Only the ungrateful refuse such a gift._ )

(It’s not mine to accept or refuse! It’s Elsa’s! She’s not some pawn you can use to celebrate my worthiness!)

(This isn’t about me… This is about her. About Elsa. About Anna. You don’t have to wipe Anna’s tears, hold her as she weeps. You don’t have to try to hold Elsa close only to have her fly from you.)

(Scream and you are ungrateful. Scream to the heavens and the heavens return only lightning, black waves rising like a nacken, white thunderbolts the glint of its eyes… It doesn’t matter that you love your daughters, doesn’t matter that they are in pain, it’s not your place to question why…)

( _“Only Ahtohallan knows…”_ )

( _“Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?”_ )

The blood-words she tasted on her tongue, Arendelle-words, were red as the blood-beads on Runeard’s imagined neck, blood-beads shed by a fine sword, Arendelle-wrought, that she drew forth for want of a staff…

For want of a staff? Had she not given up the staff?

That was how they took you – not by steel, not even by the seductiveness of affability, but by making their guilt your own…

Colonization of the mind.

So that your cutting of their throats… cut you, red as poison…

Maybe the master’s tools had a chance of dismantling the house after all, but he’d carved his roads so deep and red – red as poison – into your bleeding mind that your own guilt paralyzed you, but if she saw the root of that paralysis, why did the guilt still run bloody?

Iduna dipped her head into the waters to wash away the blood. The blood was of Arendelle, the waters were of the Forest – but when her head sank into the waters, the nacken’s eyes stared up at her and they were cold as Arendelle steel cutting her people down…

Was this colonization of the mind?

Perhaps – to a degree – but she recognized it. If she recognized it, then she could see beyond it, see clearly… but when she looked beyond, she saw how the waters did not cleanse.

If it had been because the spirits deserted her, Iduna could have endured that.

If it had been that Iduna was ashamed of the spirits after living too long in Arendelle, she could have endured that as well – because in recognizing her shame, she would have combated it, realized the worth of her own people again…

But Iduna was not ashamed of the spirits.

Iduna knew the worth of the Northuldra, never forgot it.

And, if part of her was ashamed of herself, she saw through that and understood the folly of that shame.

She did not recoil in shame, but plunged herself into the cleansing water that spilled throughout the shadows of her mind like the fountains of a dwarf-kingdom, subterranean and deep…

She turned to the spirits for solace… and the spirits _were_ there… but their presence was a terrifying thing in itself, for a guiding force guides the darkness as well as the light.

(Everything is God or God’s thought – not merely the good, but the evil…)

(But to claim the evil as well as the good, the spirits would have to acknowledge their own cruelty, and they would not do that.)

She knew that the tints of chapel stained-glass were shining at the edges of her mind now, casting strange hues upon the faith of her childhood…

(The God of stained glass was as cruel – and indeed, it was his cruelty reflected back at her from the eyes of the nokk that terrified her – no, not terrified her – made her angry.)

She saw those pastel emanations for what they were… and still the presence of the spirits offered her no peace…

Even as they tried… oh, they tried… but how do gods bring peace when their actions are the heart and root of the wound?

They do it as Runeard did, she assumed.

( _But what of free will? Our gift did not determine your choices, or Agnarr’s choices, or Elsa’s. We are not determiners, though we craft a design…)_

(Free will? Before consciousness? Before birth? Free will with a pattern woven before Elsa even opened her eyes – and if that was only a _part_ of a pattern, still it necessarily informed what was to come, positioned a child like a pawn…)

( _Positioned her for good. There is a Purpose even for this pain…_ )

(Is that supposed to comfort me? Knowing that at the end of the path there is a Purpose – as though that makes all the pain worthwhile, makes Anna’s desolation worthwhile, makes Elsa’s broken sobs worthwhile?)

( _We are not determiners, though we determine… Our gift did not determine your family’s responses to it…_ )

In that moment, Iduna felt like a child.

A helpless child on the back of a cart feeling in her heart that something was wrong in her.

A helpless child hearing screams of rage against her people and taking them to heart.

A helpless child hearing that this was somehow her fault and the fault of those she loved…

As a child, she had curled inward.

No longer.

(Don’t you dare. Don’t you _dare._ )

Iduna knew her own failings.

She knew her mistakes.

She did not seek to ignore them, hide them, mask them in martyrdom.

She had always thought the spirits different than the God of stained glass. Nature did not have a Purpose. What was, in nature, simply was. Nature did not exist to impose its Will. Yet, here the spirits were, imposing their Will…

Seeing the cruelty of the God of stained glass – the rose-window gouts of gore, the sun-whiteness of the speared side, brilliant and blinding – in the lightning-brilliance of the nacken’s eyes was an obscenity.

( _Our gift did not determine the choices made by…_ )

(Made by me? A daughter of the People of the Sun – cut off from family, from home, from father and mother… Made by Elsa? A child? Nature is the world and the world influences, the world leaves scars, and I can bear that if I accept that is simply the way the world is, without the prejudices of humankind, but if you tell me there is a Purpose, then you speak to me in the hierarchies of the God of stained glass…)

_Determine_ was a word of equivocation – like _affable_ and like _dignified._ It was a word the powerful declared to the low, a word that distorted what the low were trying to say, a word that placed the blame on the victims of pain as though they made their choices in isolation, as though the world did not influence…

(I know your Will did not determine our choices, but it did _influence_ them. You say _determine_ to evade the point – to have mastery here. You were never ones for mastery, not that I thought. I was wrong.)

The trick of the mighty was to make their guilt your own, but Iduna did not feel guilt.

She stood as her daughter would stand on the mountaintop, casting her gloves to the sky – but not in premonition, not in parallelism. Premonition, parallelism was design – design like the gold leaf on the hilt of an Arendellian sword.

_In her waters, deep and true_  
_Lay the answers and a path for you_

(As though answers made amends.)

( _They know better._ )

Iduna thought of her children, thought of herself.

(No, _we_ know better.)

We know because we have lived it.

We know because the pain is ours.

Silence in the House of Judgement.

Elsa choking on her own sobs…

The lands choked by the dam…

( _There is a path, a destiny for your children_. The voices trembled in their chorus. _They will come to know why._ )

“That doesn’t make it right,” Iduna whispered to the darkness – and the sobs of her daughters reverberated in the void.


End file.
